I find it interesting to see where we give up more and more of our privacy in favor of convenience. We all do it, the most obvious and heavily used example is credit cards. In exchange for quick payment with instant loans, we allow companies to track, collate and share information about everything we buy.
Computer technology has only furthered this. We can put things onto the network – be they blog posts, our MySpace, or all of our email/correspondence for our entire life - and we share our personal data with another entity (the company hosting this data) and in exchange we get a huge ability to always access and easily share our data. Sometimes, however, these enablements themselves can have unintended consequences and that is the heart of my post here.
I’m looking at someone’s iTunes playlist right now. I’m looking at it from the comfort of my hotel room and I have no idea who that someone is or where in this hotel they are. They do, however, enjoy Britney Spears.
And my fellow hotel guest who enjoy’s Britney isn’t the only one “sharing”. There is another person’s playlist that is exclusively classical. And still another with a huge collection too numerous and diverse to list. Do you think these folks know that I can see their playlists?
This is happening because of two pieces of technology coming together. First, any frequent iTunes user knows that you can elect to share your playlists over the network when you’re connected. This allows people in the same office or same household to see each other’s collections and to stream that music to others. Apple disables this by default, so you have to want to do it. However, most people I’ve ever talked about this with (that aren’t nerds) just assume that only people “in their area” are able to see it. This sense of proximity as safety is reinforced by the fact that Apple limits the streaming/browsing/sharing to the local subnet – typically the LAN in your office or your home. They did this to prevent people from using their software to easily serve up music to the Internet at large (something the music companies weren’t to keen to see made easier).
However, it would appear that the Westin St. Francis in room broadband is all on one subnet and that subnet is pretty wide open. Some hotels lock this stuff down a bit more to prevent people from mistakenly doing this type of thing (or from unintentionally sharing their entire HD – many people share their C drive). However, not the case here.
So, I find myself wondering if the owners of these playlists intend to share them so widely. Even if they don’t, would they care once they learned they were? Would they like that someone could see their music tastes? Maybe this is a feature for a coming iTunes – Hey I like this playlist, I’ll use the iTunes “thumbs up” chat window to let the person know, maybe we could trade info. It could be another angle on social networking tools (not dissimilar to how Microsoft hopes the Zune will be more than just an MP3 player).
Anyway, interesting. Ahem, now if you’ll excuse me, I think its a good time to double check my personal firewall is in place.
